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Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt

Online ISBN:
9780191715051
Print ISBN:
9780199299362
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt

Patricia Owens
Patricia Owens
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Queen Mary, University of London.
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Published online:
1 May 2009
Published in print:
30 August 2007
Online ISBN:
9780191715051
Print ISBN:
9780199299362
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book studies war in the thought of one of the 20th-century's most important and original political thinkers, Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt's writing was fundamentally rooted in her understanding of war and its political significance. But this element of her work has surprisingly been neglected in international and political theory. This book assesses the full range of Arendt's historical and conceptual writing on war and introduces to international theory the distinct language she used to talk about war and the political world. It builds on her re-thinking of old concepts such as power, violence, greatness, world, imperialism, evil, hypocrisy, and humanity and introduces some that are new to international thought like plurality, action, agonism, natality, and political immortality. Chapters engage Arendt's writing in dialogue with various schools of political and international theory, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, post-structuralism, post-colonial thought, neoconservatism, and Habermas-inspired critical theory. Re-reading Arendt's writing — forged through firsthand experience of occupation and struggles for liberation, political founding, and resistance in time of war — reveals a more serious engagement with war than her earlier readers have recognised. Arendt's political theory makes more sense when it is understood in the context of her thinking about war and we can think about the history and theory of warfare, and international politics in new ways by thinking with Arendt.

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